Word: bastardly
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...when the actors can't control their movement, the effect is alternately annoying and absurd. Dan Deitch as Yang Sun, the unemployed flyer, just tries to do too much with his body. He contorts across the stage, face grimacing and body tensed. Everyone knows that Yang is a bastard, so Shen Te's love for him can only be based on sheer sex appeal. Deitch, by equating gruffness and stiff limbs with masculinity makes his appeal to Shen Te incomprehensible...
...story's hero, 16-year-old Gennaro, is named for the city's patron, San Gennaro, whose clotted, vial-encased blood, according to tradition, miraculously bubbles three times each year. Gennaro's blood bubbles daily. The ebullient bastard child of a peasant mother and soldier father, he divides his zealous energies between caring for his impoverished, half-paralyzed Chinese grandfather and carrying on grandfather's moribund undertaking establishment...
...press." The thing he does best is stay away: he never goes to rehearsals unless he is asked to, shows confidence even if he doesn't feel it. "But after the out-of-town opening!" he says. "After those first stinking, rotten reviews! Boy, am I ever a bastard! Boy, do I make waves...
However, there can be too much directorial control and some players seem content merely to don the assorted masks that Carnovsky parcelled out. This foible seemed the particular property of the villains. Matt Conley in the most unkindest role of all, the bastard Edmund, exercised enough wit and restraint to stay this side of melodrama. But Regan (Phoebe Brand) and Goneril (Ludi Claire) ranted and raved, groaned and grimaced. Robert Benedict's Oswald was arch and despicable, Nick Smith's Cornwall took appropriate relish in kicking out Gloucester's eyes; these actors' evil was far too lunatic to be cruel...
These two are obviously men of "magnitude" in Aristotle's sense, and they produce a true tragic catharsis. The conflict is dramatic in many other ways: a Christian vs. a Pagan, a bastard vs. a bastard, an intelligent illiterate vs. an intelligent illiterate, an older man vs. a younger...